An unusual set of books in the Mahoney Music Collection contains and celebrates wood.

The Mahoney Music Collection covers a wide range of musical subjects. Within the subject of musical instruments — construction is an unusual set of books, the Hough’s Encyclopaedia of American Woods. While the 1957 set in the Mahoney Music Collection is not complete, a complete set has 16 two-ring binders with samples of wood and 8 volumes of descriptive text. In the binders, many American trees are represented with transverse, radial, and tangential slices of wood.

This set was the life’s work of Romeyn Beck Hough (1857-1924), botanist and son of the first chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry.

These books are the product of two major trends in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries: 1. “classification and encyclopedism” and 2. ”the invention of complex or specialized mechanical devices.” The first reveals itself to anyone who pages through the books. For the second, Hough invented and patented a machine to cut wood to the thinness he needed for his books.

Hough’s Encyclopaedia of American Woods won awards and medals at the 1889 Paris Exposition, Columbian Exposition at Chicago, Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, plus others.

These books would interest wooden musical instrument makers and collectors, furniture makers and collectors, woodworkers, botanists, and historians of science and the 19^th century.

Information and quote are from:

Vtspecblogger. The American Woods… the 19th Century… and Beyond (blog). Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. June 9, 2016. https://scuablog.lib.vt.edu/2016/06/09/the-american-woods-the-19th-century-and-beyond/ (accessed 11-22-2024).